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This book has been acclaimed by many to be the most definitive work on elephant hunting ever written. It contains a background that explains elephant management in a manner that is, inter alia, supportive of elephant hunting. Shot placement is a major part of the book's message; and explaining just how to get a bullet into an elephant's brain is a major objective. The heart and lung shots are described; and the value of crippling shots into the spine and hip joints - when wounded elephants are running away - is also emphasized. Pictures of an elephant bull carcass - propped up on its brisket and cut in half longitudinally - photographically illustrate the positions of the vital organs. The latter half of the book contains some of the author's most exciting elephant hunting stories - which are NOT repeated in the big game hunting memoir series. This makes MAHOHBOH an essential 'companion book' to the big game hunting memoir series.

Many foreign hunters - new to elephant hunting - are said to read MAHOHBOH assiduously before coming to Africa; and that when they are out in the bush elephant hunting, they carry a copy of MAHOHBOH in one hand and their rifle in the other! - This book, therefore, has made a great impression on many wannabe elephant hunters when they come to Africa on their first elephant hunting adventures.

Hard copy out of print but is available on Kindle @ Amazon

This book is the FIRST in the series comprising the author’s six big game hunting memoirs.  It covers the period 1955 to 1961 and describes the author’s introduction to dangerous big game hunting.  Although these early stories do not reflect great hunting expertise - because the author had no experience in the beginning - it accurately describes the sensations that tested his mettle: the rushes of adrenaline and the feelings of great fear - when he first ventured up close to one of Africa’s dangerous big five game animals with the intention of shooting it.  Many hunters - new to dangerous big game hunting - therefore, will end up empathizing greatly with these early stories of the author’s long career because all the emotional highs and lows that the author experienced in those early days will be exactly the same as those that every new big game hunter will experience, too. 

It is the publisher’s advice to people wanting to obtain copies of this memoir series, therefore, to start at the beginning - start with this book first - and progress through the others in chronological order; because the earlier books lay the foundations for the ones that follow.  Nevertheless, each book does stand on its.  They can all, therefore, be read independently, too. 

Price: R500.00 (excluding postage and packaging)

(Additional charges - for packaging, insurance and postage (PIP) inside South Africa: R 50.
For PIP outside South Africa please inquire at mahohboh@mahohboh.org).

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This book is the SECOND in the series of six that comprises the author’s big game hunting memoirs. It covers the period 1961 to 1964 and describes the author’s maturing years as a big game hunting game ranger.  In the beginning, the author was briefly mentored by a more experienced game ranger, who took great pains to teach him how to kill an elephant cleanly with a single brain shot; but he was shown only once how to shoot a buffalo.  Then he was let loose to hunt any and all of Africa’s dangerous ‘Big Five’ game animals on his own.  When he first went hunting them, however, he realised there were gaps in his hunting competence that you could drive a bus through; and he had to rely on his Bushman trackers to help him fill in the gaps. 

This was a very exciting time in the author’s life but it was also a very dangerous time because he truly was not fully competent to do what was expected of him. This book is all about how he filled in those gaps, and how his Bushman trackers brought him up to a state of complete big game hunting proficiency.  By the end of this period, at age 24 years old, he had become a highly experienced big game hunter.  Some of the bizarre hunting adventures he went through in the process, however, would have put the fear of God into most people.  

Price: R500.00 (excluding postage and packaging)

(Additional charges - for packaging, insurance and postage (PIP) inside South Africa: R 50.
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This book is the THIRD in a series of six comprising the author’s big game hunting memoirs.  It covers the period 1964 to 1968 when the author was the Senior Game Ranger-in-charge of the 5000 sq. mile Binga District - which is located in the middle Zambezi Valley.  Lake Kariba had filled to capacity for the first time in 1963 and it displaced 57 000 primitive Batonka tribespeople who had had to resettle in the hinterland away from the lake.  14 000 of them were located in the Binga district. 

Hundreds of thousands of wild animals had also been forced to move away from their old habitats now under the water - and they, too, resettled in the same hinterland areas occupied by the Batonka.  It was the author’s job to sort out whatever areas of conflict arose between them.  This resulted in him having to shoot very large numbers of elephants and buffaloes because they raided the people’s crops nightly; and he shot several lions, leopards and hippopotami, too. 
Elephants and buffaloes that drifted out of the valley into the highveld farming areas took the tsetse fly with them and the national cattle herd started to die of nagana - the fatal cattle disease that is carried by tsetse flies. This necessitated an elephant and buffalo eradication programme that lasted four years - to protect the national cattle herd from nagana. 
During the five years the author was at Binga he hunted more big game animals than at any other time during his entire career.

Price: R500.00 (excluding postage and packaging)

(Additional charges - for packaging, insurance and postage (PIP) inside South Africa: R 50.
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This book is the FOURTH in a series of six comprising the author’s big game hunting memoirs. It is a specialist book which chronicles the author’s pioneering black rhino capture-hunts that took place during the period 1964 to 1971.  During that time the author commanded the black rhino capture team that darted 140 black rhinos in unsafe tribal areas of the country, and moved them into safe havens in national park sanctuaries. 

To execute this capture exercise in the Zambezi Valley thickets was the most dangerous hunting the author undertook anytime in his career.  And he did it for seven long years every dry season.  It required that he use the greatest of his hunting skills because the average darting range inside the heavy brush was only between 6 and 13 yards.  The author went into the thickets with just a capture gun in his hands and with nobody anywhere near him to cover him with a heavy caliber rifle. Three members of the capture team were seriously gored and the author was knocked down and overrun by irate rhinos several times.  Despite this, the hunting of black rhinos under these conditions was the most exhilarating hunting adventure that he ever undertook.  This book, therefore, explains what are likely to be THE most unbelievable big game hunting stories ever told and the author shares these remarkable experiences with you - taking you by the hand within the narrative of every tale.  THIS is a VERY special book!

Price: R500.00 (excluding postage and packaging)

(Additional charges - for packaging, insurance and postage (PIP) inside South Africa: R 50.
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This book is the FIFTH book in a series of six comprising the author’s big game hunting memoirs. It covers the period 1968 to 1983 and explains the author’s commitments to reducing the populations of elephants (by 2500) and hippos (by 300) in the Gonarezhou National Park, in the early 1970s; to capturing and translocating 30 hippos; and, following his promotion to Provincial Game Warden, to re-structuring the sport of falconry nation-wide. It explains his involvement in the DDT environmental pollution saga in the late 1970s; the circumstances of his transfer back to Main Camp, Hwange National Park; his incidental involvement with the brutal slaughter of an estimated 20 000 to 30 000 Matabele civilians by Robert Mugabe’s Presidential Guard (5 Brigade) in 1983 - which made the author a target for Mugabe’s infamous Central Intelligence Organisation (C.I.O.). This forced the author to resign and to leave Zimbabwe.

The title of this book alludes to the fact that it had been the author’s ambition to be appointed to the post of Provincial Game Warden-in-charge of Hwange National Park; that he got there; that he reach up and touched the sky - briefly - whereafter it came tumbling down around him and he had to abandon all his ambitions and his passions in a hurry, to escape the country with his life; and with the lives of his wife and his family.

Price: R500.00 (excluding postage and packaging)

(Additional charges - for packaging, insurance and postage (PIP) inside South Africa: R 50.
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This book is the SIXTH and last book in a series of six comprising the author’s big game hunting memoirs.  It covers the period 1964 to 1980 and specifically deals with his and his Bushman trackers’ involvement in the Rhodesian Bush War.  He was ‘in’ the war, therefore - during his military call-up periods - from start to finish.  Even before war broke out, he and his trackers were using their expert tracking and hunting skills to train Rhodesian Security Force soldiers.  For 16 years - on and off - they tracked down, located, and often engaged Robert Mugabe’s so-called Zimbabwe Freedom Fighters - also known as guerrillas.  They were called ‘terrorists’ by the Rhodesians.  In effect, the author and his trackers became specialist ‘Hunters of Men’.

This book offers a range of unique and very special ‘man-hunting’ adventures that are a great rarity in the modern day and age.   It also offers a new and enlightened historical perspective of the last 3000 years in south-central Africa that has nowhere else been expressed.

Price: R 500 (excluding postage and packaging)

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This book simply had to be written! Its subject has been the author's all consuming passion for as long as he can remember - thus he has a deep and pragmatic understanding of the problems and/or issues concerning the management of Africa's elephants and its national parks.

ELEPHANT 'CONSERVATION' covers a multitude of topics. Not only does it discuss the principles and practices of elephant management, per se, in great detail and in layman's language - it also traces the development of the international organisations (IUCN, WWF and CITES) that moulded his perceptions of the rights and wrongs that currently exist in the field of wildlife management; and it outlines these organisations' track records up until the present time. He identifies the progressive corruption of the principles of these three once august bodies - that evolved in tandem with their ever closer association with the animal rights brigade. He proclaims that CITES is now a weapon in the hands of the animal rightists and that it should be disbanded because it represents a totally negative factor in modern day wildlife management practices. And he predicts the development of anarchy in the ranks of the IUCN - which will lead to its ultimate demise.

This chronicle, inter alia, describes the big elephant poaching pandemics that have occurred in Africa and that resulted in: unprecedented elephant population reductions in Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe; and the killing of thousands of black rhinos in Kenya, Zambia and Zimbabwe - from 1970 to the present time. The people who orchestrated these killings are named and shamed; and they are not members of the Chinese and Vietnamese poaching mafia! Nor are they the poor village hunters who were often employed to pull the triggers.

The pernicious and continued involvement of the animal rights brigade in Africa is also catalogued in detail.

This book is a 'must read' for concerned nature-loving people throughout the world - whose eyes will be opened because it reveals astounding truths, an extensive corroboration of which can be found on the internet.

Price: R300.00 (excluding postage and packaging)

(Additional charges - for packaging, insurance and postage (PIP) inside South Africa: R 50.
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This is the author’s first novel - a ‘faction’ book (fiction based on fact).  It tells the story of a Rhodesian game warden who voluntarily offered his big game hunting and tracking skills to the Rhodesian Security Forces during the Bush War.  It is a human story which, because it is fictional, allowed the author to present the case for BOTH sides of the conflict.  Whilst Robert Mugabe’s ZANLA guerrillas (terrorists) were fighting to get out from under the yoke of the Rhodesian white settler government, the game warden and his two Bushman trackers tracked them down and engaged them in combat, time and time again. The plot involves an intriguing love story that ends in death and sorrow.

Many of the atrocities and contacts with guerrilla forces described are based on real life war incidents that the author personally experienced.  And laced throughout the narrative is the presence of Nehanda, an almost true to life personality - the dominant spirit in the Zimbabwe people’s ancestor worshiping religion. Whether you believe in the supernatural or not, the Mashona people, who revered Nehanda, ensured that she played a powerful role in their lives.

This is as near to the truth about what really happened during the Rhodesian Bush War, as anyone is ever likely to get.  And for those who wonder what it must be like to be a ‘hunter of men’ - read this story.

Price: R300.00 (excluding postage and packaging)

(Additional charges - for packaging, insurance and postage (PIP) inside South Africa: R 50.
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This is a true story.  Shadrek was the most notorious native elephant poacher in Rhodesia’s history.  In the 1960s and 1970s he lived on the Rio Save (Sabi River) inside Mozambique and, for many years, he regularly crossed the border into Rhodesia’s (now Zimbabwe’s) Gonarezhou National Park.  There he hunted the game reserve’s biggest elephant bulls.

During the Rhodesian Bush War, Shadrek teamed up with the author and led him to the locations of 10 ZANLA terrorist camps inside Mozambique.  Later, in a single morning, the combined might of the Rhodesian Security Forces wiped out all 10 camps.  Following this successful operation, Shadrek’s treatment by the Rhodesians was scurrilous.  This book is Shadrek’s story!

(Available from Safari Press, California)

This inexpensive little book was written as a ‘handbook for hunters’ at the behest of South Africa’s three main hunter associations.  It explains the principles and practices of wildlife management (‘conservation’) in simple to understand layman’s language.  It should be an obligatory acquisition for every nature-loving hunter’s bookshelf - worldwide. Non-hunting nature-lovers would also learn a great deal from reading this exciting little book. 

Dr. John Ledger, a conservationist of note in South Africa, and a leading light in the Wildlife and Environmental Society of South Africa (WESSA), says of this little booklet:
“… I found myself engrossed in a work of great substance and importance.  Don’t let the small size of this book fool you.  It is one of the best and most lucid guides to conservation and wildlife management that I have ever read.
This book is packed with concise and practical information about natural resource management.  It should be prescribed reading for all biology teachers, naturalists and interested citizens, and I recommend it without reservation to all our WESSA members and hope it will find its way into the environmental education programmes of the society.  Ron Thomson writes without fear or favour.  His mind is well organised.  His innovative solutions to difficult wildlife management problems are compelling. And nobody articulates them quite like he does.”

Price: R100.00 (excluding postage and packaging)

(Additional charges - for packaging, insurance and postage (PIP) inside South Africa: FREE.
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REVISED and REORGANISED from the original "A Hunter's Trails and a Hunter's Tales" mini series volumes - this revised series also contains new stories that were not published in the original series

Available on kindle @ Amazon